I was always told when learning to drive that you shouldn’t use cruise control when it’s raining. I never have but why can’t we?
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For one, so you don’t get too comfortable and take your foot off the pedals. You want to be able to react more quickly and brake or at least ease off the gas if you need to.
Secondly, the cruise control is designed to keep the car going regularly on dry roads. When the road is wet you risk hydroplaning, when the tires don’t have enough traction and you start sliding around. Cruise control isn’t necessarily designed to deal with that so it can cause you to loose control if you do go over a slick patch of road or hit a deep puddle especially with one side of the car.
My cruise control shuts itself off in the rain – the sensor gets too muddy to work properly.
Almost got thrown off the road in winter due to rear wheels starting to spin on an icy uphill. Was using cruise control at the time. 2020 BMW with studded winter tyres. Traction control/stability control/cruise control just didn’t react quick enough (when the spin was noticeable it was already too late).
Thanks to stability control the spin stopped on the other lane and there was no other traffic.
I guess it’s the same idea – avoiding wheelspin due to cruise control on slippery surfaces.
For modern cars it’s no longer a stability issue, rather it’s sensor issues.
Modern cruise controls are pretty much all ACCs, distance measuring sensors detect traffic and car lane markings in front of you to decide optimal speed and traffic following.
Those sensors, especially long-distance ones used for ACC, work terribly in the rains, either you end up really close to the car in front of you before getting any signals back, or it gets false positive readings all the time and you can’t follow the traffic properly.
It’s mainly old thinking. It was bad on early analog systems because the system couldn’t control the vehicle in dangerous situations and could unpredictably accelerate causing the driver to lose control.
With newer abs systems (late 80’s and newer) and traction controls the car will usually disable cruise control if it sees something dangerous. This can also be unpredictable but at least won’t accelerate dangerously.
The newer autonomous cruise control systems use cameras and may disable itself if it can’t “see”. It’s not “dangerous” but more that it doesn’t have the information it needs combined with liability issues.
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